The Insane Economics Of Android

Have you ever wondered how Android makes money? From the user perspective, Android is a completely free-to-use OS with an insane amount of Google services also bundled in for free. But, despite being free to the end user, it turns out that Android is quite lucrative for Google. For starters, Android generally charges phone manufacturers a licensing fee of up to $40 per device. The most obvious revenue generator however is the Google Play Store which generates up to $48 billion per year. But, Google also has several indirect ways of monetizing Android as well. For example, Android drives an insane amount of traffic to all of Google’s services whether that be Google Maps, Google Search, Chrome, Drive, Google Assistant, and so much more. And often times, mobile revenue is what accounts for the majority of the revenue generated by these services. With Maps, for example, 80-90% of all their revenue comes from mobile devices most of which is likely from Android. This video describes the top ways that Goog